Generative AI burst into the public domain in 2022, with seemingly unlimited potential. But could its abilities be hitting a ceiling already?
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A new five-year survey of the Magellanic Clouds will answer some questions about our neighbors
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies and satellites of the Milky Way. The LMC is about 163,000 light-years away and the SMC is about 206,000 light-years away, and their close proximity makes them excellent laboratories for the study of galaxies in general. The Clouds are the focus of a new research group being formed at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP).
Both clouds are home to numerous objects and regions that capture astronomers’ attention. The LMC hosts the Tarantula Nebula, an extremely active star-forming region that contains some of the largest stars known. The SMC hosts NGC 346, an open star cluster that contains numerous massive stars and is still forming many high-mass stars. The Clouds also contain variable stars that act as standard candles in the cosmic distance ladder. That’s just a sample from a long list of the clouds’ interesting features.
It can be easier to study things like star formation in galaxies other than the Milky Way, because we’re inside the Milky Way and can’t see all of it. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are excellent natural laboratories to study how galaxies evolve because astronomers can see them from a good vantage point.
Non-opioid ‘pain sponge’ therapy shows promise for chronic pain relief and halting cartilage degeneration
SereNeuro Therapeutics, a preclinical biotechnology company developing non-opioid pain therapies, has unveiled new data on a novel approach to chronic pain management and joint tissue preservation. The data highlight SN101, a first-in-class induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived therapy.
The announcement was made at the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) Symposium Accelerating PSC-Derived Cell Therapies: Starting with the End in Mind.
Spatial Intelligence Is AI’s Next Frontier
Today, leading AI technology such as large language models (LLMs) have begun to transform how we access and work with abstract knowledge. Yet they remain wordsmiths in the dark, eloquent but inexperienced, knowledgeable but ungrounded.
For humans, spatial intelligence is the scaffolding upon which our cognition is built. It’s at work when we passively observe or actively seek to create. It drives our reasoning and planning, even on the most abstract topics. And it’s essential to the way we interact—verbally or physically, with our peers or with the environment itself. When machines are endowed with this ability, it will transform how we create and interact with real and virtual worlds—revolutionizing storytelling, robotics, scientific discovery, and beyond. This is AI’s next frontier, and why 2025 was such a pivotal year.
The candid truth is that AI’s spatial capabilities remain far from the human level. But tremendous progress has indeed been made. Multimodal LLMs, trained with voluminous multimedia data in addition to textual data, have introduced some basics of spatial awareness, and today’s AI can analyze pictures, answer questions about them, and generate hyperrealistic images and short videos.